“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

0. The Nord Stream pipeline incident was not an accident.

1. The pipeline was sabotaged by a state actor.

   a. Only a state had the capability to carry it out undetected.

   b. The sabotage was in violation of international law.

   c. Evidence of the sabotage would cause a diplomatic scandal.

   d? Either Russia or the United States sabotaged the pipeline.

   e? The sabotage was authorised at the highest levels.

   a? Russia had no motivation to destroy it.

   b. Russia controls the pipeline, and could choose to turn it off.

   c. No state has presented evidence that Russia was involved in the sabotage.

   d. The area is highly monitored by US and US-aligned countries.

   a. The US had strategic and economic motivations to prevent the pipeline from operating.

   b. The US govt made public statements prior to the sabotage that, had they been made by the Kremlin, would have uncontroversially implicated Russia in the eyes of the American public.

   c. The US has the means to destroy it.

   d? The US has the means to hide their involvement in the sabotage from European allies and the US public. 

   e. The Western public have no appetite for stories which portray Russia as a victim, or US/EU as villains. Hiding their involvement is therefore trivial, since media outlets have no motivation to investigate the truth.

   f. Conversely, Russian state and media have no incentive to investigate, since the Russian audience takes it for granted that NATO was responsible.

Russia wanted to cause panic and meltdown on EUs energy markets, but to no avail. Russia tried to sabotage gas supply by fiddling with turbines for months, but was in the end out of options, and EU gas prices were still too far from panic and collapse. Blowing up underwater gas pipes the same day that a gas pipe from Norway started to work - too good to be coincidence.

> Russia controls the pipeline, and could choose to turn it off

No, Russia cannot just turn off the gas without a force majeure cause (and even declaring the war to Ukraine, which will never be an option, is not a force majeure enough). Otherwise there are contractual obligations to fulfill, and enormous penalties in case of breaching contract.

penalties they could simply just ignore if they choose to. After all, they forced the sale in rubles, despite this not being part of the initial agreement of gas sales.

blowing it up seems just too much of shooting-self-in-the-foot for russia, unless russia can confidently lay the blame onto the west (particularly, the US) as the culprit.